The kp/31 Suomi submachine gun in Finnish service was an outstanding weapon, but it was slow and expensive to manufacture. When Finnish forces began capturing Soviet PPS-42 and PPS-43 submachine guns form the Soviets in the Continuation War, it was very quickly decided that Finland should copy th...

The kp/31, aka M31 "Suomi" submachine gun was adopted by the Finnish Army in 1931. It was produced by the Tikkakoski company (more commonly known today as Tikka), and in addition to Finnish military contracts they were eager for international sales, either commercial or military. To that end, the...

The American 180 is a .22 rimfire submachine gun that fires at 1200-1500 rounds per minute or more, and feeds from drums of 177 to 275 rounds capacity. While it makes a great recreational machine gun, it was actually initially developed with law enforcement sales in mind. The notion was that the ...

Shortly after the end of World War Two, Yugoslavia adopted a submachine gun that looked very much like the Soviet PPSh-41, and was obviously inspired by it. However, the manufacturing methods were completely different, with the Yugoslav gun being of all milled construction and with internal parts...

The Yugoslav M49/57 submachine gun looks very similar to the Soviet PPSh-41, but it constructed quite differently, and has a much larger recoil spring. The question is, how will it shoot? Will it be fast and controllable like the Papasha or slower like the Sudayev?

Thanks to Marstar for lettin...

In order to circumvent Versailles Treaty restrictions on arms manufacture, the German Rheinmetall firm purchased a small Swiss company called Solothurn Waffenfabrik in 1929, allowing it to route its business through Switzerland instead of Germany. One of its first products was the S1-100 submachi...

George Hyde designed the gun that would eventually be adopted as the M2 submachine gun in the late 1930s, and it was first tested at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in October of 1939. At that time, the gun had many good traits (weight, handlings, etc) but suffered from parts breakage and unreliability....

The Star Z-70B was an incremental improvement on the earlier Z-62 and Z-63 submachine guns adopted by the Spanish military and security services. It remains an open bolt, selective fire design, with an underfolding stock. The trigger has changed from a progressive type to a standard trigger with ...

Designed by Aimo Lahti, the Suomi m/31 submachine gun is in my opinion one of the standout submachine guns of the World War Two era. Despite its hefty weight (10.4lb / 4.7kg) and lack of a good pistol grip stock, it still manages to be tremendously controllable and accurate, with a very high rate...

The Kommando semiauto carbine was designed in 1975 by Alexis du Plessis in Rhodesia, and went on the be manufactured in South Africa a few years later by the Maxim Parabellum company. The final iteration of the design came in 1980/81 with this, the Paramax. The molded lower housing of the Kommand...

Some collectors hunt for firearms which look perfectly new form the factory, and others prefer arms that show lots of evidence of use and history. Well, this is definitely one of the latter type - this 1943 production MP40 submachine gun has a terrible finish, most likely as a result of being bur...

Poland was one of the states which manufactured the Soviet PPS-43 submachine gun under license, but they decided to make a change to is in 1952. Where the original PPS-43 used a top-folding metal stock, the Poles decided to instead add a fixed wooden buttstock. This made the gun substantially mor...

Before he made a big success with the M10 (MAC-10) submachine gun, Gordon Ingram designed a couple other guns. His initial M5 submachine gun and M20 light machine gun never went past prototype stage, but the M6 did prove to be successful, at least in a limited way. The M6 was a very simple blowba...

While the US Army was satisfied with the Thompson as a fighting weapon in World War Two, it was most certainly not happy with the gun's exorbitant price tag. The Thompson was a very expensive gun, and the Army wanted to see that change. In March of 1942, engineers at the Savage factory submitted ...

The pre-war Beretta Model 38A was a magnificent SMG, but it included a fair number of fancy elements that would prove to costly to justify once wartime production needs grew. Beretta would simplify the design progressively over the course of the war. What we have today is a Model 38/42 with a muc...

The Beretta Model 38A was an outstanding SMG at the beginning of World War Two, loaded with features and very easy to shoot. However, it was expensive and complex to produce, and pressures of war forced Beretta to progressively simplify its construction. This happened incrementally, but the most ...

I have long been told that the Smith & Wesson Model 76 is a very nice submachine gun to shoot, despite its rather crude appearance. Some complain about a very heavy trigger pull, but this gun does not have that problem. Well, in my opinion the stories I have been told are true - the 76 is an almo...

Early in the Vietnam War, the US Navy acquired a quantity of Swedish M/45B submachine guns (“Swedish K”) for special forces use. By 1966, however, the Swedish government would no longer authorize sales of arms to the United States because of involvement in the Vietnam War. So instead, the US turn...

One would think that the Shpagin PPSh-41 was as simple as a submachine gun could get, but that wasn’t the case in World War Two USSR. Barely had the PPSh gotten into real production than the Army was looking for something even simpler. An answer came from young designer Aleksey Sudaev with a comp...

The first prototype Thompsons submachine guns (and it was Thompson who coined that term, by the way) were produced in 1919 and dubbed the "Annihilators". The gun was intended to be a military weapon to equip American soldiers in World War One, but by the time the gun was developed the war had end...

Police in inter-war Germany used a variety of submachine guns, and sometimes added a distinctive extra safety mechanism to them. No patent or documentation ha been uncovered (that I am aware of, anyway), but the exact same device is found on gun from the MP18,I through the MP40, including the MP3...

Heckler & Koch's "Operational Briefcase" is a clever system for covert carry of a submachine gun without the need to conceal such a large type of weapon under bulky clothing. By putting the gun into a briefcase, they gave security personnel a way to blend right into the business and executive typ...

When I filmed yesterday's video on the MP-41/44, and did not know I would have a chance to actually do some live fire with it. But we snuck off to a little shooting range to have a try (sorry for the poor lighting!). The question going in for me was whether the locking system and the weight of th...

A crash program to produce the PPD 34/38 after the initial battles of the Winter War, even as the improved PPD 40 was being rapidly developed. These are very rare gun today, and we have the chance to take the example out to the range and see how it handles...